La droit de la deconnexion

My coolest blog title yet is taken from a law passed recently in France. It means “the right to disconnect”, and it follows on from another provision of a couple of years ago called the right to be forgotten.One of the wonders of the age is how our smart phones enable us to respond to emails anywhere in the world and at any time of day or night. We all know how email has become a fundamental part of business life. A crowded inbox has become a symbol of busyness and therefore importance. As it happens, yesterday I had no emails between 11.30 and 2.04. There were three possible explanations: (1) I was dead (2) the cloud had stopped working (3) everything was cool and no one had any questions for me.The French law starts with a concern about the impact on workers’ health, but there’s also a labour issue, which is that no one wants to do work for which they’re not getting paid. Actually, most of staff members’ out-of-hours email is driven by managers. An HBR study found that senior managers could reduce emails received outside working hours by 80% through simply not sending emails after 5pm and on weekends.In some ways it would have been more French to pass a law requiring work emails to be turned off after hours, though the markets are likely to sort that out anyway. Volkswagen, for example, turns off its servers after hours and Daimler allows employees to delete emails received while on vacation. We all know the value of switching off – you can’t recharge your batteries if you’re always on.  Our brains need to switch off from business just like there are times when we need to reboot our computers – the software gets all tangled up and needs to be reset.It’s the same with us, and it’s an interesting thought: would your world collapse if you turned off your email at 5.30pm and on Friday evening?